Steve’s Stuff

As hoped, I’m starting to get a lot better making music with a lot of gear. I think the trick is having one or two elements that are unobtrusive, but can hold everything together. This gives a sense of continuity as well as providing some musical content that I don’t have to constantly worry about.

Another trick is focusing on one thing and not trying to micromanage. It’s like the first drum set situation - the little drummer has his/her first drum set with all sorts of drums and cymbals and they want to get around to all the different sounds at every opportunity. As expected, this isn’t very musical. For some reason I had to relearn this lesson over the course of a few hours.

Playing two midi keyboards at once is not actually all that difficult as long as you’re not trying to play two radically different things at once. I have it set up so one is usually a bass sound and the other is some sort of pad* or lead sound. The second midi keyboard is significantly more limited because it controls the Roland synth module. The Roland synth module is very very lame. The only usable sounds are a biting square wave, a nasty saw tooth patch, and a mellow pad-like patch. Most of the variety is going to come from Reaktor.

I’m not using the drum machine all that much right now, but Lauren plans to join me at times during the show, so I imagine she’ll put it to good use. The cool things that I’ve found to do with it include running it through the Alesis FX unit and totally overloading the Alesis until it starts freaking out and making “bad” sounds.

The Alesis is a bit tricky to control. It’s old and I’m not 100% sure that it’s functioning properly. It really only has the three controls that one would expect (In, Out, and Mix). I’m getting some interesting results by running a totally wet (meaning totally processed, as opposed to partially processed) signal at extreme output levels. I can manage the overall volume with the mixer so nobody is going to go deaf. When you overload the Alesis it does weird things in addition to the normal feedback and infinite delay effects. Random squelches and squeals are always fun. Always.

This is a sample of my short hand that helps me get things set for a particular piece. From here, I have all the settings that I need to remember. You’ll probably wonder where the notes themselves are. That’s the easy part. I don’t need to write it down.

Song 4
R:SongD.ens
MID1:Equi4
MID2:082Saw
K:PR1
AFX:84
IN:6
MIX:6
OUT:6

*a pad sound is something full and rich in texture that can go on underneath a more active melodic line. They’re typically used for chords and such.